06 - One Family in God

The little apartment on the Aventine hill became a beehive of activity after James’ death as Paul vigorously renewed his efforts. Messengers came in and went out to the Christian congregations of Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia, and Paul, who couldn’t go in the flesh, went in the spirit through his letters. Among his staff of assistants, John Mark became more than just a fellow worker, for there was much in him that reminded Paul of Barnabas. Justus, too, became part of the organization.

Paul prepared to send letters to Ephesus by the hand of Tychicus, recently arrived from Asia Minor, and to Colossi by the hand of Onesimus.

In these letters Paul’s spirit is calmer and more clarified than in previous letters. They lack the bitterness and bursts of anger that marked the letter to the Philippians. Paul is no longer thinking of his personal enemies. His thoughts, in so far as they are concerned with opposition, are directed against the general enemies of the faith, the “philosophers” and misleaders, the Gnostics, the aesthetes, and “choice spirits,” who would make Christ a privilege for the “inner circle,” the initiated and educated, who teach that Christ couldn’t have died, since Christ was not a man, but was composed of pure spirit, his whole life just a series of symbols, intelligible only to the trained mind.

Paul saw this approach to the faith as an attempt to change Christ into a philosophical concept, like Stoicism was among the Greeks and Romans. But Christ was not a symbol or a series of symbols. He was not a “philosophy,” or the “Logos” for the cognoscenti. Christ was and is the flesh and blood of faith for all, the universal redemption. Every man is buried with Christ and every man is resurrected with him through faith in the work of God. In the faith every man shares Christ’s triumph over death, not symbolically, but in the flesh. By the death and resurrection of Christ, every man who accepts the faith is released from the laws of nature that govern the world, because he is no longer of the world. He is part of the order of heaven; he has died in Christ to the order of the world.

“Why do you think of the laws as if you were of the world? If you have risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God. For you are dead, and you are hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, you will be revealed with him in glory. Therefore put to death those things that are of the earth, such as whoredom, uncleanness, lust, base desire, idol worship. . . .”

The conquest of death and the linking of the self with Christ became clarified in Paul’s mind after James’ death. Like Peter, Paul too envied James’ ascension, and he longed to be with Christ in heaven. But he regards the present part of his sojourn on earth as more important than any previous part. In these critical days Paul understands that his present task is to prepare Christians for a great trial, the like of which will require every resource of faith. Every believer has to be made to feel that he is one with the body and soul of Jesus and therefore ready to abandon all earthly possessions and being. He has to act as though there is nothing more to expect from this world, as though all hope and expectation are bound up with the world beyond the grave.

So he writes to the Ephesians, “It is our peace that has made one out of two and has thrown down the dividing wall. Through his flesh Christ has destroyed the enmity of the Torah, which consisted of laws and commandments so that out of two men he might make one new in himself, and bring peace. For through him both Jew and Gentile have access to the Father in one spirit. Therefore you are no longer strangers and converts, but sons of the house in the family of God.”

Paul has begun to find his way back to God, Whom he’d lost for a time, because of his love for Christ, his zeal for his mission, and his bitterness against his enemies. After he asks the Ephesians not to be oppressed “because of my sufferings for you, which are a glory,” he tells them, “Therefore I bend the knee to the Father of Jesus Christ, in Whom all the families in heaven and on earth are named. . . . And it is one God and Father for all, One Who is over all and in all.”

In no other letter does Paul work so hard to inscribe the Ten Commandments in the hearts of the believers, as in the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians. Although he absolves them of the laws and commandments as such, since they have the fulfillment of them in faith, yet they must live on earth, and life on earth is sinful. So they must have guidance and rules. One principle he would plant forever in the lives of the Gentiles is the purity of family life, so he talks about the bodily union of man and wife in a holy bond.

“Be obedient to one another in the fear of God. Wives be obedient to your husbands as to the lord, for the husband is the head of the wife. . .”

Here is a man who has never known the happiness of family life, having bound himself to lifelong celibacy for the sake of his mission, and yet he recognizes the mysterious bond that holds man and wife in a sacred bond of body and soul with trembling awe. The sacred purity of the Jewish woman, which tradition has passed down from mother to daughter, is his guide in the rule of family life for the congregations of Christ.

From his youth he remembers the lessons from the rabbis, “The husband who loves his wife more than his own body, and honors her more than he honors himself, peace shall dwell in his tent.”
And, “The Shechina, the Presence, dwells between husband and wife.”

And so he exalts family life to the level of high worship of God.

“Husbands, love your wives! As Christ loved his congregation, and sacrificed himself for it, so shall you husbands love your wives even as your own bodies.”

And in the spirit of the Pharisees, who said, “He that honors his wife honors himself,” Paul writes, “He who loves his wife loves himself.”

“As Christ is to the church, so is the husband to the wife, the limbs of his body, his flesh, his bone, even as it is written, ‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall be one body.’”

All his longing for pure love is in the words, “Children, heed your parents in the lord.”
“Honor your father and your mother, which is according to the commandment, that it may be well with you and that you may live long in the land.”

Indeed, for all his abrogation of the law and the commandments, the directives he addresses to Jews and Gentiles are taken almost word for word from the commandments of Moses. They were hammered out again in the school of Paul’s rabbi, Gamaliel, and now Paul sends them forth again from the gates of Rome. He nourishes his congregations with milk, and supports them in the first steps they take into the new life.

“Put aside deceit and lying, let brother speak truth to his brother, for we are all members of one another. . . . He who is inclined to steal, let him steal no more, but let him work and do good with his hands, so that he may have something to give to the needy. . . . Let no evil talk come from your lips, but only what is good and an aid to improvement.”

He bids servants obey their masters in fear and trembling. “You know that the good you do shall be returned to you by our lord, whether you are servants or masters. . . . And you that are masters, deal thus also with your servants, be not harsh with them, for you know that your lord is in heaven and he is no respecter of persons.”

And in the same vein does he enjoin the Colossians too.

Toward the end of his letter to the Ephesians this new spirit in Paul sings with the tone of the Psalmist himself. Gone is the bitterness and resentment. Gabelus, the faithful soldier, and the men he brought with him had contributed something toward this change. Caesar’s legionaries, in their helmets and shining bronze breastplates, had thrown themselves at his feet, begging to be taken into the faith. This gave rise to an image in Paul’s mind of the believer with the weapons to repulse the assault on his faith, not with physical weapons, but with arms and armor that would never rust.

“Put on the whole armor of God,” he writes, “that you may be able to stand firm in the evil day. Gird yourselves with truth, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. Above all grasp the shield of faith, and set the helmet of salvation on your head, holding in your hand the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

He labors hard and long with himself in order to create the image of the armed believer. In a sense all his life has been a preparation for this creation. He’s made many detours; he’s erred and blundered. But in the end his feet are on the true path. Others may have found it more easily, but Paul did find it, step by painful step.

“The old is dead, and the new man has been born.”


Paul sent his messengers out with these letters to the four corners of the world. Epaphroditus, having recovered his health, went back to the Philippians, Tychicus returned to Ephesus and Onesimus to the Colossians. Remaining at Paul’s side were the faithful Aristarchus, John Mark, Justus, and Timothy.

And so he sat in his hired house on the Aventine, the hand that was chained to the guard lifted up in a proclamation of freedom and redemption for the world. It was lifted up for the liberation not only of the slave, but of the freedman too. This was the universal freedom of God, beyond the law of man. No Caesar on his throne, no evil in the hearts of men, should ever abrogate it. From his prison house Paul conferred on all men a new and irrevocable citizenship in the name of Christ.